In the introduction to A Little Commonwealth, his 1970 work on family life in Plymouth Colony, John Demos observed that this kind of study had not gained “a wide following among working historians” (p. vii). Most historians, he said, still preferred to concentrate on large social units such as region, class, or party and leave the family, “the smallest and most intimate of all group environments,” to anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists (p. viii). Today, almost twenty years later, no such statement can be justified. Since 1970, the new social history, including family history, has grown dramatically to become a significant force in contemporary historiography. Thus, in his latest book, a collection of essays on the family and the life course in American history, Demos offers no special pleading for his subject and simply assumes his readers will understand and accept its importance. Demos now writes with the quiet confidence of one who is working well within the mainstream of historical scholarship.

This nicely crafted and clearly written volume examines the course of America's colleges from the eve of the Stamp Act crisis to the mid-1780s. Distributing his attention even-handedly among the nine colonial colleges, John Roche details the ways in which college leaders and students participated in the revolutionary movement, and, in turn, the ways in which the Revolution affected the colleges. The focus is on the flow of events, not on their longer-term implications and consequences.

In 1869 Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe published a compendium of advice to women entitled The American Woman's Home. This popular and influential book urged its readers to construct homes that could also serve as schools and as churches. Beecher and Stowe sketched for their readers a Gothic revival cottage with a steeple for a chimney and a moveable screen to convert the parlor into a nave. This cottage that looked like a church poses the fundamental question underlying Colleen McDannell's book: why and how did Victorian Americans conceive such close connections between the home and religious observance?